The Winter Soldier: Has America Changed Too Much for Captain America?

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We visit the set of Cap 2 and discover Steve Rogers at a turning point.

By Eric Goldman

Last summer, with Comic-Con just around the corner, I was among a group of journalists who paid a visit to the set of Captain America: The Winter Soldier, where we got to see a couple of Marvel superheroes come to life right before our eyes. Captain America himself and the Falcon were in action that day, as Chris Evans and Anthony Mackie, in their full Cap and Falcon costumes (well, minus Falcon's wings), shot scenes from late in the film, doing all they could to stop a desperate situation.

Over the course of the day, we had the chance to sit down with several of The Winter Soldier crew -- including Evans, Mackie, screenwriters Stephen McFeely & Christopher Markus (Pain & Gain, Thor: The Dark World), producer Kevin Feige and directors Anthony Russo and Joe Russo (Community, Arrested Development) -- to find out more about what to expect from Cap's big sequel. While you can already read what Evans had to say that day from an earlier report, you'll find out a lot more below about the new conflicts facing Steve Rogers.

Cap and the Conspiracy

The Captain America: The Winter Soldier team all noted that the film is, essentially, a conspiracy thriller, influenced by the likes of Three Days of the Condor, The Parallax View and Marathon Man. Co-writer Stephen McFeely explained, “The first movie was a war movie first and foremost as that made the most sense in terms of the origin story for Steve, but given what he needs to deal with as a man out of time, dealing with different values from his own and everyone he knows is dead and ‘who can he trust?’ and all that, the conspiracy genre seemed a really good one for him and excited the heck out of us and so that’s the direction we went.”

McFeely and his writing partner Christopher Markus noted a conspiracy story dovetailed with using Captain America comic books for inspiration as well, beyond The Winter Soldier story, with Markus recalling, “It seems like in the 70s and 80s, every five seconds he’s throwing down his outfit and going ‘I have to go search America and find out who I am.’ Then the government goes, ‘We own you, Steve Rogers!’” Markus elaborated that they liked the idea of exploring, “Okay, the man who once represented America has become dented by the passage of time, and alien to America and alien to the values and the thought systems.” He added, “In order to represent America, he has to get a better understanding of America, that kind of thing. And there’s great conspiracy stuff. Our bad guy is not Richard Nixon [Editor's note: Yes, this happened in a Cap comic book], but that is a great conspiracy.”

Scarlett Johansson and Chris Evans on the set of Captain America: The Winter Soldier.

Cap being from another era will come into play as he examines how threats are dealt with in this day and age. As Markus put it, “When you have a monolithic evil like Nazis, your choices are clear. It’s not like you’re going to go ‘Well maybe I will appease the Nazis for a little while.’ Once you really get going, you have to stamp out the evil. Now, there’s a few examples of evil, but you can almost always find a counter argument in ‘everybody’s human’ and it’s all mushy and dirty and much less easy to get a read on who is evil and who is righteous. You open the newspaper… ‘is it okay to spy on everybody? Are drones okay?’ You can’t get away from it now and that’s the world he’s in. He would love there to be black and white, but there isn’t anymore.”

Kevin Feige said that when it came to the depiction of Cap, “I don’t mind if it feels old fashioned. I don’t mind if he feels out of place. He is out of place and he is kind of old fashioned in the modern era. I care if he feels two dimensional. I care if he feels boring or if he feels in any way not like a fully formed character. But in this movie we’re embracing that side. That’s part of his conflict with Fury and with some of the other members of S.H.I.E.L.D. is the fact that he’s from a different place. He has a different set of values, I think. Or at least he thinks he does initially. And we want to play into that and run towards that which creates conflict, which creates drama, which creates character. You know, we’re careful not to make him a goofball fish out of water. We don’t spend a lot of time with him trying to understand what an iPhone is.”

Feige said he liked the conspiracy theory approach because, “We make a lot of superhero movies here at Marvel Studios and I believe the key is to make them all different and to make them all unique and to make them all stand apart while connecting together. And that’s what the comics do. You can find Captain America stories that are as sort of two dimensional and red, white and blue as you would think from the costume. Then you’ve got great stories in the 70s and 80s and then you have the amazing Brubaker run, which is sort of dealing with this notion of conspiracies and authorities and what it seems to be coinciding with when Cap returned in the early 60s and then suddenly ten years later there’s Watergate and he’s gone through the 70s. That’s interesting stuff to me. So we’re sort of pulling from all of those tales for this story. And like the first film was a Marvel superhero origin story masquerading as a World War II propaganda movie, this is a Marvel superhero sequel masquerading as a 1970s political thriller. And then, frankly, all the stuff that’s happening now with the NSA and the news is just pretty amazing timing for us because that’s the kind of thing Cap doesn’t particularly like - that our fake comic book organization and real life national security organization seem to be doing. Which again is always nice, when your big entertaining fun competent movie can touch into some aspect of a grounded real world – no matter how crazy that real world may be.”

Continue to Page 2 to learn more about how the directors of Community and Arrested Development ended up taking on Captain America.